Trends
What's moving in the law and what it means for officers, judges, and first responders. Lawsuits that change broker behavior. Federal rules in the works. State statutes spreading from one capital to the next.
ALPR litigation in 2025-2026: how license-plate readers are getting tested under DPPA
Automated license-plate readers are everywhere now. The lawsuits trying to rein them in are picking up. Most of the legal pressure runs through one federal statute: the Driver's Privacy Protection Act.
CFPB's December 2024 proposed rule on data broker sales of sensitive personal info
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau proposed a rule in December 2024 that would treat most data brokers like credit bureaus. If finalized, it cuts off a chunk of the pipeline that puts your home address on Spokeo. Big if.
How Daniel's Law spread from 1 state in 2021 to 14 jurisdictions in 2026
Daniel's Law lets covered first responders force data brokers to remove their home address. New Jersey passed it in 2021. Thirteen other jurisdictions have followed. The coverage varies wildly.
AI facial recognition is the new doxxing accelerant. Masks do not help.
Between August and November 2025, ICE agents got doxxed at scale. The tool was a $30-a-month facial recognition site. The masks they wore on enforcement details did not stop it. Here is how the pipeline works and what to do about it.
Court records are going online. Your home address is going with them.
The federal courts are rebuilding their public records system after a 2025 hack. Florida is forcing local agencies to digitize records starting July 2025. Both moves make filings easier to find. Both also pull officer addresses into the search index.
Four states require data brokers to register. Many brokers do not. The gap is where the danger lives.
California, Vermont, Oregon, and Texas require data brokers to register with the state. Compliance is uneven. The brokers most dangerous to officers, the ones selling investigative-grade lookups, are also the most likely to skip registration. Here's what that means for protection.
Automated broker-removal services for first responders. What they cover and what they miss.
DeleteMe, Optery, and Incogni are the dominant automated broker-removal services. They cover the consumer-facing tier well. They miss the investigative tier almost entirely. Here is the honest comparison and where each fits in a cop's protection plan.
The Hortman assassination is the catalyst behind every doxxing bill on the table.
On June 14, 2025, an assassin used eleven data broker websites to find Minnesota state representative Melissa Hortman's home address. Then he shot her and her husband. Every doxxing bill moving in Congress and state legislatures right now cites that case. Here is why.
The doxxing-bill wave of 2025-2026: every pending bill and what it would do.
Federal and state lawmakers introduced more doxxing-protection bills for first responders in 2025-2026 than in any prior period. None has passed yet. The momentum is real. The bills are not. Here is the full slate, what each would actually do, and where each one stands.
Post-Dobbs doxxing of abortion providers: the data-broker layer is the upstream vector
Doxxing of abortion providers escalated sharply after the Supreme Court's June 2022 Dobbs decision. Anti-abortion groups built dossiers using public records and commercial brokers, then published them on searchable websites. The empirical work shows the broker layer is the upstream pipeline. Provider safety in 2026 starts with closing it.
COVID-era physician harassment: 18% of doctors had private info shared online during the pandemic
The pandemic period from 2020 through 2022 turned physician doxxing from a rare incident into a documented systemic pattern. A 2023 University of Chicago study of 358 physicians and biomedical scientists found 18% had their private information shared online. The harassment infrastructure built during COVID is still in place. The defensive practice has to assume it is.